ATLANTIC WITCHCRAFT
released APRIL 3, 2020
ALBUM 32, RELEASE 86
The most important HW album. This was the first time I had my own audio interface and MIDI controller, so this album is the sound of me learning how to properly use a DAW to make my own music. It shows on tracks like "Atlantic Witchcraft" and "A Beautiful Fire", where I was able to record MIDI drums to a click (they sound better quantized than unquantized, trust me) and dial in amp sims to actually sound good. I'd used both of these before, but they never sounded this good. I made the "A Scenic Hell Unearthed" video for a class I was in. I forget what the assignment was, just that I immediately knew this song fit what the professor was looking for. "Mercy Stares" is good but it's too long. If I repeated things less it would easily be at least a minute shorter, and it'd be a little better as a result. "If That's Not Victory" was slated as the opening track for a minute there. I was listening to a lot of Gang Of Four when I was making this. I was on a kick when Andy Gill died 2 days after I showed someone "Damaged Goods" and his response was "I've never heard anyone play guitar like that". "Great Flood" is the strongest of my various ripoffs from this time. "Interference" features the "ba" voice sound from New Super Mario Bros on the DS. As I said when I wrote about Held to a Brighter Light, there are video game soundfonts all over this album. "For The Town", if memory serves, used the Pokemon Diamond soundfont. The music for "Plastered" was the first thing I wrote for the album (but not the first I recorded, at least in the way you hear it). It went through a few titles before I settled on "Plastered", the most notable of which were "Skin Machine" and "People Face".
"Marianne" used to be one of my favorites on here. I've grown less interest in ballads over the years. "Homewrecker In 5" was the first song I recorded in any capacity for the album. There's an original mix floating around somewhere out there with different instrumentation and an extremely creepy robot voice (Marie Ork, who also pops up on "Burn The Flower" and "Draining The Lakes"). "Jupiter X" was written around a song I wrote on a toy piano, but the instrument is largely absent from the final mix because it really didn't line up with the click. "Burn The Flower" was my first attempt at writing a song that sounded like Deerhoof. It doesn't sound like them at all but I did think I'd written my best song ever by trying. It's still up there for me. I couldn't decide if "Fallout Shelter" should be in D or E, so I settled for Eb. One of the guitars was recorded slow and the other was recorded fast. Reaper's varispeed knob was, and is, a gamechanger. "Bitter Moon" has a lot of weird chords, so of course it's still one of my favorites. "Draining The Lakes" was first written for a RateYourMusic compilation called Incognita Fortuna. The theme was sending other people song titles and the other person having to use one of those titles. Someone sent me "Draining The Lakes" and 2 others that I didn't use. The chords are lifted from a 2019 song called "Burning Out The Ego" that I wasn't totally satisfied. The chorus of "that, that, is a good thing" was stuck in my head occasionally from mid-2019 to early 2020 when I wrote this song with it. "Supernova" uses Pokemon sounds (I think HeartGold) to make what I think is the prettiest song on the album. A year later, "Savannah" would fill a similar role.
This is still one of my favorite HW albums. There's something bright-eyed about this that most HW albums don't have. Maybe it's the thrill of discovery. It doesn't matter.